FreeNX Ups the Remote Linux Desktop Ante

With FreeNX, you get a secure, fast remote desktop for Linux that connects from any major platform.

You fine folks who need to connect remotely to your Linux boxen and
prefer to use a nice graphical desktop should take a look at FreeNX.

FreeNX lets you connect from a Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris or Windows
client, has built-in encryption, is easy to set up and use, and is
satisfyingly fast over slow connections. It performs well even when you
use a heavyweight desktop like GNOME or KDE, and there is hardly any
noticeable lag with lighter-weight window managers like IceWM and XFce.

But, you ask, what about the current champ of remote X sessions, VNC (Virtual Network Computing)? VNC
has long been the favorite remote graphical desktop for Linux. VNC is
easy to use and runs on all the major operating systems, and is
especially good for controlling two different systems with a single
keyboard and mouse. (See Resources.) VNC has a couple of small
disadvantages, however: You'll get noticeable lag over a slow
connection, and the free edition has no built-in encryption, but sends
all traffic in clear-text. To run encrypted sessions requires
purchasing one of the commercial editions, or tunneling through SSH.

FreeNX is a similar program based on NoMachine's NX terminal server
technology. It does not run on all the platforms that VNC does; its
main advantages are it is fast even over dialup, and it comes with SSH
support built-in. NoMachine released their basic libraries under the
GPL, thank you very much, and thus FreeNX was born. NoMachine's
commercial versions are more fully-featured and come with technical
support. FreeNX is ideal for users who want a free, secure, fast thin
Linux client, or who need to access Linux machines from a variety of
clients on other platforms.

Debian Installation
FreeNX has not yet made it into Debian's official archives. To get
FreeNX for your Debian system add this line to
/etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://kanotix.com/files/debian/ ./

Next, run apt-get update as root to update your package lists,
then install with

# apt-get install nxserver

It will pull in other packages to satisfy all dependencies, such as
expect, freenx, libnxcomp0, libnxcompext0, netcat, nxagent, nxlibs,
and nxproxy. During installation it will ask you if you
want to use the default DSA key that ships with FreeNX. Opt for custom
keys, because using the default key is quite obviously non-secure, and
the installer does all the work of creating and installing the custom
keys anyway, so you have nothing to gain by using the default.

Then, as root, you'll need to add users and passwords for users who are
authorized to connect to the server. These users must also have system
accounts, so if they are not in /etc/passwd you'll have to
create system accounts for them. This is standard SSH behavior, and
users who do not have accounts have no business trying to log in, so
don't whine about it. It is also a good security practice to force
remote users to have different passwords than their system logins:

# nxserver --adduser carla
# nxserver --passwd carla

Interestingly, you only get one chance to set the password -- it does
not ask for confirmation, so type carefully.

It is not necessary to run the nxsetup utility because the
installer does the setup for you. Make sure port 22 is open, and you're
done.

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